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Source: Revolutionary History, Vol. 5 No. 1, 1993.
Prepared for the Marxists’ Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.
James P. Cannon and the Early Years of American Communism: Selected Writings and Speeches, 1920–1928
Prometheus Research Library, New York 1991, pp. 624, $22.50
When Pathfinder Press, the publishing house of the American Socialist Workers Party, put up the prices of Trotsky’s books in order to finance propaganda for Fidel Castro, they also stopped printing the half-completed works of James P. Cannon, and even threw some of his old library into a rubbish skip (Sweep Jack Barnes into the Dumpster of History, Workers Vanguard, 1 January 1983). Fortunately the Spartacists, among others, continue the cult of his memory, and one of the results is this volume. It fills a real gap in his career only partly touched upon in his Speeches for Socialism and Notebook of an Agitator, though the principles of selection are not the same, as we shall see, for this is a much more dull book.
For whereas the Notebook was vigorous and popular, the introduction to this collection reveals the preoccupations of the Spartacists right from the start by admitting that ‘our selection of Cannon’s writings and speeches is heavily weighted toward internal factional material’ (pp. 2–3). This is a shame, for Cannon had a lively agitational style. His strengths flowed from the fact that he was a genuine workers’ leader, and were not at all on the theoretical side. But our Spartacists love a good old faction fight, for their concept of revolutionary struggle is of an activity of permanent factioneering, tracing their origins to Cannon’s involvement in what they call the ‘vitality’ of the American Communist Party, which they are pleased to note was ‘totally lacking’ in the Communist Party of Great Britain. They have managed to convince themselves that the latter organisation was ‘left with only former members of H.M. Hyndman’s sterile British Socialist Party’ (p. 10). William Paul, Arthur MacManus, Tom Bell, J.T. Murphy and Willie Gallacher apparently never existed. But in fact, the origins of the CPGB were little different from those of their American cousins, both being amalgams of ‘dogmatic, syndicalist and more or less exotic groups’ that were marginal to the labour movements of their respective countries. The only difference was that the heterogeneity of the early American party (upper-class radicals, Syndicalists, foreign and native social democrats, but in particular the large semi-autonomous language federations) preserved its factional groupings throughout in their pristine condition, whereas the greater homogeneity of the British working class broke down the previous factional barriers in the CPGB almost as soon as functional unity had been achieved.
But to get back to the point. Now accepted as the hallmark of the Spartacists on four continents, it is fascinating to discover from this book just how far back into American communist history this obsessive factional meddling goes. Sam Bornstein once asked Sam Gordon why the American SWP constantly intrigued within the other sections of the Fourth International, creating factions that had never existed before over issues that had never previously disturbed anybody. ‘To separate the sheep from the goats’, was his reply. ‘That’s all very well’, Sam Bornstein shot back, ‘but how can you tell which is which?’
Apart from having ‘the bag of tricks of the typical American politician’, as Claude McKay put it (p. 15), Cannon was also an unashamed admirer of Zinoviev (p. 16), who provided the international dimension to the politics of manipulation. Cannon trooped off to Moscow with the rest of them, obediently accepted its verdicts, and came back parroting its denunciations. ‘The practice of the Central Executive Committee in turning to the Communist International for advice and guidance and for the solution of various disputed questions apparently does not commend itself to Comrade Askeli’ (p. 334), he replies acidly to someone who had the temerity to question the endless procession of bitter opponents forever tittle-tattling to the boss. Cannon, like all the rest, tried to gain Moscow’s support by associating his opponents in the American party with one or other of the factions that had already fallen under the censure of the Comintern. Ludwig Lore, for example, is denounced for supporting Brandler ‘against the Left Wing’ (p. 313). Cannon’s admiration for the Comintern at this time is evidently shared by the editors, who clearly want to be the Zinoviev of the pocket chess set. Since Trotsky’s distaste for such practices, either in the original or in microcosm, is well documented, they are obliged to express the opinion that ‘Lore’s public complaints about the zigzags of Zinoviev had more in common with Levi than with Trotsky’ (p. 35), despite the fact that Lore offered a good deal more support to Trotsky during this period than Cannon ever did. As for Paul Levi, who first published and wrote the preface to Trotsky’s Lessons of October in Germany, he is simply dismissed as an ‘expelled rightist’ (p. 35).
Coming on to Trotsky himself, the material gathered here (especially pp. 286–87) in every way endorses the verdict of the preface that until his expulsion ‘Cannon certainly voted for all the ritual anti-Trotsky resolutions’ (p. 54). This lends further support to the theory that during this period Cannon was not a supporter of the left at all, but a partisan of Zinoviev. He only took up Trotskyism after his faction had been reduced to being the smallest of all by the defection of Foster, while his last pilgrimage to Moscow had shown that he would never get the endorsement of the Comintern. The famous tale that Cannon underwent a road to Damascus-style conversion upon reading Trotsky’s Critique of the Draft Programme of the Comintern is repeated (pp. 61–64), although, as Irving Howe pointed out long ago, the controversy was hardly new, and ‘Cannon had been to Moscow several times before and had shown no interest in these documents, which had all the while been available’ (Howe and Coser, The American Communist Party: A Critical History (1919–1957), p. 162). Far from being assimilated at the time, when the first issue of the American Militant began to serialise Trotsky’s criticism, it was printed along with The Right Danger in the American Party, the Cannon–Foster–Bittelman factional document written for the Sixth Congress of the Comintern, which was the purest distillation of Third Period bilge. Whilst listed in the bibliography on page 610, this document is significantly absent from the text. And the editors are still reluctant to accept the fact that the Critique in question was smuggled out of Moscow, not by Cannon, but by George Weston (p. 64), although this is fully confirmed by Harry Wicks’ recently published memoirs (Keeping My Head, p. 158).
Another fascinating thing to emerge in view of the utter incomprehension of the Labor Party slogan today by all the SWP split-offs, as regards both the sectarianism of the Spartacists and the Workers League, and the Popular Front enthusiasms of the others for black and women’s ‘progressive’ third parties, is the fact that whilst Lore understood what Trotsky was driving at (pp. 196–206), Cannon never did. First he fell back upon the argument drawn from American exceptionalism: ‘The attempt to transfer European Labor Party analogies to America is bound to lead us astray for the simple reason that there is no real analogy.’ (p. 171) Next he progressed to the position still held by our editors, that of the classic ‘united front from below’: ‘Neither do we expect the reactionary leaders to form the Labor Party. It has to be done by a bloc of the radical and progressive workers in which the communists are the driving force.’ (p. 173)
Then he gave his support to the LaFollette ‘Third Party’ progressives, holding ‘this step of supporting the candidates of a petty-bourgeois liberal third party’ to be ‘correct’, mistakenly believing it to be ‘in accord with the general strategy of the CI [Communist International] (as manifested in its attitude to the British Labour Party’ (p. 202). When he finally accepted the slogan of a Labor Party, he was glad to drop it again as quickly as he could. Even Cannon’s tendency to accommodate to the ‘progressives’ inside the trade unions, for which Trotsky later sharply criticised the SWP (Writings of Leon Trotsky 1939–40, pp. 263–73), appears here as early as 1923 (pp. 158, 159, 170).
By now it should have become clear that the peculiar features of American Trotskyism, which so sharply distinguish it from the movement in the rest of the world — its factionalism and sectarianism, its manipulative approach, the weakness of its grasp of united front politics — all lie deep in the origins of the Communist Party of the USA, and were brought over into the new movement by the unfortunate predominance of its American section. Thus no serious inquirer into the history of Trotskyism can afford to neglect this book, which explains so much that would be otherwise incomprehensible in international left-wing politics.
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Last updated: 9 February 2015